Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about habits. How do they form? How do they change? And the selfish one - how can you build a product that is habit forming? My cofunder sent me a great Nir & Far blog post that goes into detail about generating desire which is a great read to anyone building a consumer product.
Along these lines, I decided to be a bit introspective and see which products and sites are a part of my habit. A simple way was to type each letter of the alphabet into the Google Chrome address bar and see what site autocompletes. Here goes:
- analytics.google.com
- bankofamerica.com
- cad-comic.com/cad
- docs.google.com
- eventbrite.com
- facebook.com
- glos.si
- heroku.com
- instapaper.com
- joinblended.com
- klout.com
- linkedin.com
- maps.google.com
- news.ycombinator.com
- optimum.com
- plus.google.com
- questionablecontent.net
- reader.google.com
- startupmullings.com
- twitter.com
- udacity.com
- voice.google.com
- wixlounge.com
- xkcd.com
- youtube.com
- zerply.com
After excluding my sites (glos.si and startupmullings.com), we can organize them into the following categories:
- Entertainment (the comic sites - xkcd, QC, CAD; Youtube; Google Reader)
- Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter)
- Utilities (Google analytics/docs/voice, Bank of America, Instapaper, Eventbrite, Optimum, Heroku)
- The rare letters (Zerply, Udacity, Wix Lounge). I’d like to include Klout on this list rather than admit to browsing it but I don’t know if that will be believable.
Every consumer site should strive to get to browser autocomplete status for some users rather than being semi-popular to more users. Being useful to a few passionate users and growing with their help is a much better approach than trying to immediately appeal to the mass market.
And although this exercise may be embarrassing, I’d love to see what others have as their 26 sites.